Seoul, August 12, 2016 (screening), http://www.mmca.go.kr
In addition to exhibitions, MMCA also organizes a screening program that introduces artists-filmmakers. The screenings take place in comfortable cinema space within the building and are freely accessible with the purchase of a standard museum ticket. Much better than watching these art movies on some more or less uncomfortable setup within an ill-suited gallery space.
The work of the Otolith Group always contained a certain mysterious atmosphere for me. That is probably their biggest skill – not really saying much while keeping the film running. Usually the result is more of a feeling than a coherent narrative concept that could be grasped. It has been not different in the two movies here.
Otolith III (49 min, 2009) mixed the future and the past, referring to an unmade sci-fi movie by a (probably nonexistent) Indian director. It was a dream-like journey, and it was more of a feeling than an observation that the movie had to do something with colonialism and a modernist utopia, all mixed together with the personal investment of individuals who experience emotions and project their dreams onto a larger canvas of both history as well as the canvas of film. The never-making of the film suggests the impossibility of a wholeness and resolve to universal questions, as well as the never-ending quest of achieving that which always stays beyond reach.
Hydra Decapita (31 min, 2010) consisted almost solely of monochrome shots of the sea with a few interspersed shots also related to the sea and the landscape that surrounds it. The cluster of narratives that the film took up was centered around the transport of slaves across the sea on ships, juxtaposed with a myth of an underwater species that evolved out of the slaves thrown overboard that survived in the underwater circumstances, same as an unborn child who lives within the watery womb of the mother. Again, the whole film was mysterious, with images, titles and voiceovers providing scarce clues about what was going on. In the end it was rather a feeling than anything specific left behind.
Keeping a mystery seems to be one of the prerequisites for art, creating a space in which our thoughts can float and interact with the subject matter without being forced into a one-way thinking lane. This has to be appreciated on the Otolith Group’s movies.
